The handles of the gurney were slick in Trenn’s numb grasp. Its single obsidian wheel, Skate, sat motionless in a bed of ashes. On the stretcher, Ezy lay still, unconscious.

  The last of their Healing Balm had cleared the burns, but it couldn't replace what was gone. His gaze kept sliding away from the puckered flesh where her right eye had been, from the ragged hole of her ear and the clean, awful stump of her arm below the elbow.

  Above, Bomber circled, its wings a nervous buzz in the profound silence left by Zeen’s dying fantasy. The reek of incinerated timber and rendered fat was the reward of their victory.

  A choked, guttural sound tore from Zeen’s throat. He stumbled forward, his metal crutch plunging deep into the ash and throwing him off balance. He fell to his one good knee, his hands sinking into the warm ruin of his dreams.

  “GIL!”

  The name was not a question, but a raw scream of pure agony. It tore through the dead air, a Mourner’s Call in a field of ash. Something stirred amidst the quiet desolation. Mara’s head snapped up, her bow already in hand as her amber eyes scanned the skeletal timbers.

  There could be survivors. Trenn pushed his Clairaudience into the Wayrest’s ruins, searching for a heartbeat, a voice, a cry for help.

  His Clairaudience plunged into a chorus of death. Smoke filled his lungs. Searing heat blistered his skin. A child’s confusion died in his throat, swallowed by a roar of flames. The smell of his own flesh burning. The crunch of his own bones. A hundred simultaneous death rattles were vibrating through his teeth.

  The assault left him a hollowed, ringing shell. The world was a smear of grey ash, the ruin of the Wayrest an unfocused blur. He stood, paralyzed, his jaw slack, a tremor running through his frame. The psychic echo faded, but the whispers remained, a residue of the blast slithering directly into his mind.

  “…you did this…” said a voice behind him. He spun. There was no one.

  A hand gripped his shoulder, the touch a pressure from another world. Mara’s voice was a muffled sound, lost in the ghost-chorus still screaming in his skull. He fought for a breath, the air tasting of grit and finality.

  “…you let us burn…” said a new disincarnated voice.

  Mara’s hand squeezed, a point of grounding reality in the storm. Her voice cut through again, sharper this time, her urgency a blade against the fog. He met her amber eyes, his own wide with horror. The single word he managed to force from his throat was not a warning. It was a ragged, guttural command.

  “RUN!”

  The word shattered the stillness. An unnatural frost settled over Wayrest’s ruin. The ash-covered ground cooled instantly, hissing as plumes of steam rose into the air. The dust began to swirl, forming eddies that defied the wind.

  “Murderer…,” echoed the combined weight of a hundred ghosts, a judgment that struck deeper than any blade.

  The ground itself began to crawl as dry rivers of ash converged with a grating hiss.

  A figure congealed from the ash where Gil’s grill once stood. It took the shape of a Gnome, broad-shouldered and kind, but its form was made of churning soot, and its eyes were hollow pits of despair.

  “Zeen,” a voice hissed, a cinder-choked echo of his partner’s laugh. “You left me to burn, Zeen.”

  The wraith’s soft features hardened into a mask of rage. “YOU CREMATED ME!” A wave of pure loss crashed over Zeen, buckling his good knee as the contours of his partner's face twisted by agony and hate.

  A choked, disbelieving sob escaped his throat as he reached a trembling hand forward. “Gil…?”

  A hand of compressed soot shot forward from the wraith. Zeen threw himself back with a cry of terror as the claws raked across his cheek, leaving two shallow furrows that welled with blood.

  The swaggering ambition drained from the Gnome’s posture, leaving him slack-jawed and hollow. He didn’t recoil from the blow. He didn’t scream or touch the wounds. He froze. The calculating light in his eyes winked out, replaced by a vacant stare fixed on the churning cloud of ash.

  “Ash-Wraiths!” screamed Mara. “Don’t listen to them, Trenn! They’ll paralyze you with their pain!”

  Trenn had already hefted Ezy’s unconscious form on his shoulder and was moving to grab Zeen by the back of his collar. With a swift movement, he lifted the smuggler’s small frame off the floor, while ashes formed into wraiths amongst the ruined Wayrest.

  Trenn tilted his head to drop Skate to the floor and planted his foot on its smooth surface. He kicked off, gliding fast away from the blackened skeletal structure, with Ezy and Zeen, one in each arm.

  Mara dropped down into a four-legged run and followed, easily outpacing Trenn.

  A unified roar erupted behind him, and he risked a glance over his shoulder. The individual wraiths were gone, replaced by a surging cloud of black dust that arced through the sky like a heat-seeking missile aimed directly at him.

  The ash clouds surged after them, arcing through the skeletal trees like heat-seeking missiles.

  Ahead, Mara flowed over skeletal logs and fallen timbers. She leapt past boulders. Meanwhile, Trenn’s path was a desperate weave through the difficult terrain, each turn bleeding his momentum.

  The flying Ash-Wraiths had no such obstacle. They quickly caught up with Trenn and swiped at him from all sides. Their nightmarish guilt-trips hissed in his ears. “Your fault… your fire…” A claw tore at Trenn’s composite armor, ripping off a large piece of hide meant to protect his back.

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  Trenn’s frantic kicks billowed ashes. Skate bucked beneath him, its smooth glide fighting the uneven ground of the ruined forest. His leg muscles burned, his breath was short, and his balance was precarious under the dead weight of the Gnomes.

  There was no dodging. Only the mad zig-zag through the burnt woods, and his attempt to maintain his speed.

  Over and around him, the swirling mists kept whispering their poison. A grasping hand of soot lashed from a nearby wraith. Its ashen claws ripped through leather and hide. A piece of his back armor flew off. Another set of claws manifested, this time from below. It gripped Trenn’s kicking leg, tearing off his greave as he continued to push madly off the ground to increase Skate’s speed.

  Through the skeletal lattice of branches, a flicker of pink and yellow caught his eye. Bomber. It wheeled against the ash-choked sky, its flight path tightening into a sharp, deliberate figure-eight. A signal they used during the Goblin War to signal a non-hostile point of interest.

  “Mara!” Trenn’s voice was a raw bark of exertion. “Bomber! North!”

  The white-furred missile instantly veered, angling towards Bomber’s sky dance. Trenn kicked hard, pushing Skate and his heavy burden onto the new heading. Charred branches scraped at his armor, snagging at the limp forms of the Gnomes.

  The ground beneath Skate smoothed instantly, the jarring rattle of the forest floor replaced by the hiss of packed earth. Before him, a straight, clear path cut through the burnt trees—a wide dirt road. In the center of the road, canted at an odd angle, stood a two-story log cottage. A short flight of stairs led to a porch and a sky-blue front door.

  Matching sky-blue shutters flanked the windows on each floor. The door, shutters, and the stairs were adorned with complex cuneiforms that reminded him of runic symbols found in videogames.

  A rocking chair, its frame carved from polished, interlocking bone, sat on the porch. Delicate floral patterns spiraled across its surface, carved whimsically with artistic flair and painted in greens in yellows on bone white.

  From the second-floor balcony, a series of mobiles dangled on sinew threads. They were crafted from the painted skulls of birds and rodents, their surfaces covered in intricate swirls and dots of vibrant color.

  Polished vertebrae and colorful feathers were interspersed between them, creating a series of delicate chimes that produced a hollow, melodic clatter in the wind.

  “We burned while you rested,” a voice whispered, slithering through the wind. “You could have saved us,” a voice boomed as gnarled teeth startled Trenn into a dodge.

  The combined weight of his two gnome charges wrecked his balance. Skate wobbled violently, throwing him to the ground.

  Ezy and Zeen were shot from his arm, landing in the ash like ragdolls. They landed with a boneless thud, Zeen’s splinted leg snapping against the ground with a dry crack. Ash puffed up around them. Zeen’s eyes were wide and vacant, darting towards threats only he could see.

  The pursuing Wraiths converged into a swirling cloud, surrounding Trenn, Skate, Ezy, and Zeen. The pressure dropped, pulling at his eardrums as the individual phantoms dissolved into a singular whirlwind. It was pulling the ash from the ground and burnt trees, using it to swell into a twenty-foot tornado of screaming faces and grasping hands.

  “A Dust Devil!” screamed Mara, as she lost sight of Trenn within the ashen storm. “Don’t touch the vortex, you’ll be thrown into the sky!”

  Soot-claws shot inside the eye of the storm, clawing at Trenn’s armor. The claws screeched against the Reptile Kin and Hobgoblin leathers, scoring deep gouges into its plates. Ezy and Zeen, however, were not so lucky. The swirling ashes cut through their clothes and skin, causing Zeen to howl and cry in pain.

  Ashen claws tried to pierce the pliable Purple Slime, but their claws broke on its slick surface. Their wails were useless against its animal intellect. It simply stayed near Trenn, radiating with fear.

  Mara nocked her enchanted arrow—the one found on the Gem-Croc—and loosed.

  When it pierced the Dust-Devil’s whirlwind, a spectral face was flung clear of the spinning ashe’s collective mass. It shrieked and dissolved in a soundless puff, raining to the ground.

  The arrow continued its flight across the eye of the storm and burst from the far side, ripping a second shrieking undead from the Dust-Devil’s spinning ashes. Two gaping wounds now orbited the tornado, spinning holes in a churning wall of distorted faces and claws.

  “I knew it was enchanted!” Mara’s voice was a triumphant roar over the gale.

  Inside the vortex, grasping hands of compressed soot continued to lash out of the spinning walls, their claws scraping and screeching against his armor. The shrieking of a hundred ghosts promising to tear him apart. The nearest spinning gap raced toward him.

  A claw of packed soot lashed out, tearing through his armor and ripping a gash across his back. A grunt of pain was ripped from him.

  I need to get Ezy and Zeen out of here, he thought, lifting Ezy’s unconscious form off the ground.

  There was no time to aim, no chance for a clean throw. It was an ugly, two-handed shot put, a desperate shove from the chest that sent her tumbling. She flew like a ragdoll of limp limbs, her dead weight making the throw go wide. The whirlwind of ashes moved too quickly and clipped her side, a deep gash tearing through her tunic before she spun onto the dirt road.

  A claw took advantage of Trenn’s throw to strike at his face, opening his cheek from his ear to his lips. He screamed in pain, his slashed cheek protesting the movement by sending another fresh wave of agony to Trenn’s brain. Dazed, he never saw the next clawed hand slash at his bared calf, forcing Trenn onto one knee.

  He grabbed Zeen, who was still weeping. The Gnome was an awkward, sobbing bundle, no heavier than a sack of basketballs. “Snap out of it!” he roared. Years of coaching, of demonstrating the perfect throw, of muscle memory burned into his nerves from a thousand gymnasium games—it all coalesced.

  He didn't aim; he knew the trajectory. He timed the spin of the vortex and threw the weeping Gnome cleanly through the approaching tear in the deadly ash storm.

  If I don't make it out of this, at least you will, he thought, as claws ripped off his remaining vambrace.

  Trenn pushed to his feet and armed himself with his enchanted long-club. If her arrow worked… It wasn’t long until another pair of claws manifested. He swung his club at them, and they reeled, knocked away, before dissolving back into the Dust-Devil.

  It didn’t kill them, but it kept me alive! His gaze then locked onto Mara’s as one of the orbiting holes in the ashen storm passed between them.

  “Run,” he mouthed, flinching as he moved his slashed cheek.

  Her eyes lost focus for a second, her head tilting as if listening to something he couldn't hear.

  A discordant hum resonated from the cottage. It’s a Mana Source! The mana that irradiated from the structure was strange. Its pitch was discordant, but resonated with the purity of an elemental attunement.

  It was faint; nowhere near the power of the Yardone’s Mushroom Ring. But more than enough for Mara, the Hedge Mage.

  Resolve steeled in her amber eyes as her bow clattered in the ash.

  Her arms spread to her sides as her fingers splayed.

  A deep grin widened, lit up her amber eyes as three-inch claws of bone and honed mana slid from her fingertips. Their edges were different from her Guardian claws. They were jagged and reflected a sickly green-black shine, instead of the clean razors of her past.

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